Education Week - July 10, 2013 - 24

24 EDUCATION WEEK
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JULY 10, 2013 www.edweek.org
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Action Camp 2.0: Where Students Learn to Be Activists
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
ing for school-based offenses that can lead
to criminal charges, and at-school arrests
for behavior that might not be a crime anywhere
else.
Young people are key to the pipeline’s deconstruction,
said James Eichner, the managing
director of programs for the Advancement
Project, the Washington-based civil
rights group that sponsored the weekend’s
events.
“When just advocates meet with policymakers,
it is just not as effective as when
they hear from youth voices,” he said, recounting
a March meeting with U.S. Secretary
of Education Arne Duncan. It was one
of the youngest members of the group who
dared to hand the secretary homework:
reading a new agreement between the
Denver Police Department and the school
district that limits the role of law enforcement
in district schools.
Sandy Hook’s Effect
Youth voices are even more critical now,
leaders at the June 28-30 training session
said. The movement away from zero-tolerance
discipline policies and the stationing
of police in schools was gaining momentum,
they said, until the Dec. 14 shootings
at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown,
Conn., where 26 students and staff
members were killed by an armed intruder.
But in the months since the Newtown
shootings, at least three states have approved
laws that allow teachers to come
to school carrying guns, and several states
have adopted laws that allow or pay for
police officers in schools. President Barack
Obama’s call to action on gun control and
mental health included a proposal to give
schools money that could be used to hire
either counselors or police officers.
Many of the shifts in discipline policies
and practices away from get-tough tactics
have occurred piecemeal, where federal
investigators intervened, where local politicians
could be swayed to the views of the
critics of zero tolerance, or where civil rights
groups have made inroads on this front.
The districts in Buffalo, N.Y.; Los Angeles;
and Oakland, Calif., each wrote new policies
and practices in a variation on or combination
of the methods for changing discipline
policies.
Action Camps like the one here and
about a half-dozen elsewhere in the past
two years are designed to organize and
systematize the movement away from zero
tolerance where other outside forces may
be slower to prompt it. When the sessions
end, camp organizers scatter the newly energized
students like so many heated kernels
of popcorn just before they burst.
Students from at least 16 states from
coast to coast attended the all-expensespaid
weekend of activities in Denver.
By the end, participants were armed with
lessons about: how to set realistic goals; how
important the unlikeliest of allies, such as police
officers and principals, could be in their
battles; how to back arguments with data;
and how, in the trainers’ view, the students
are being suppressed—even if they didn’t recognize
it until they were stuck with a square
on a bingo card they couldn’t cross off.
Modeling Acceptance
At Action Camp, acceptance was a theme
in nearly every interaction. In addition to
name tags, Action Campers wore special
labels denoting the gender pronouns they
wanted others to use. Restroom signs at the
school were papered over to erase gender
AUDIO: Education Week’s Nirvi Shah
spent the weekend in Denver with
students at Action Camp 2.0.
www.edweek.org/go/
actioncamp
FROM TOP:
Beraka Bland, a 17-year-old
student from the Baltimore
Algebra Project, plays a game
where life outcomes are
determined by rolling dice
during a meeting of activists
and youths at the School-toPrison
Pipeline Action
Camp 2.0 in Denver.
Haydi Torres, 16, speaks
during a meeting at the
Denver camp. Ms. Torres
of Alexandria, Va., came to the
camp because she wants to
learn more about bringing
restorative discipline
practices to her school.
distinctions and point out only the fixtures
available, either a combination of toilets
and urinals or toilets only. Students apologized
if they blurted that someone was
Mexican, rushing to say Latino instead.
The catered meals accommodated vegans,
vegetarians, carnivores, and those with gluten
allergies.
One morning, longtime activist Lalo
Montoya, 26, of Denver, and a relative newcomer
Ezinne Nwankwo, 18, of Los Angeles,
played host in a twist on a classic board
game called “The Game of K-12 Life.”
Students with disabilities, students who
were gay, black, Latino, learning English,
or poor—or some combination thereof—
always had the hardest time getting the
needed numbers on the dice.
They were played by students who, in
some cases, were clearly not a match with
their game identity. For example, David
Blair, a recent high school graduate from
Baltimore who is black, played the white
character Dylan. Police chased down students
whose characters were late to school
or violated the dress code, and some of those
students lost their access to school.
Over and over, Mr. Montoya told students
who faced expulsion or failure, “The game
of life is over for you.”
By contrast, Dylan, the only white char-
acter in the game, lives in a five-bedroom
house in Long Island, N.Y., where a bad day
is losing the state semifinals. (They didn’t
name the sport.) When he ran into conflicts
with classmates, his school used restorative
practices to heal the ruptures that emerged
between students, and he didn’t miss any
school.
Though it may seem like a stereotyped
portrayal, especially in an arena of acceptance,
it’s not, said Sanyu Gichie, 20, who
is coordinating a campaign to ban out-ofschool
suspensions in the Wake County,
N.C., area.
Black and brown students are more affected
by poverty, Ms. Gichie said, and the
problems that come with it. She added that
teachers who act as inspirations and guides
are more scarce for students of minority
backgrounds—at least that’s how it feels
to her.
Data from a variety of sources and institutions
back up the claim that discipline
is meted out more severely for students of
color and students with disabilities. And
no one at Action Camp, even students who
admit to some poor behavior in the past,
would concede that the lopsided treatment
is the result of students’ simply being more
unruly.
At Manual Arts Senior High School in
Los Angeles, police cars are always outside
and police officers are always inside, said
Michael Davis, 16, one of the camp participants.
His family has been affected by crime,
as well as by gang involvement and arrest,
he said, and the law-enforcement presence
does anything but make him feel safe.
Setting the Scene
The weekend’s events in Denver couldn’t
have taken place in a more inspiring setting,
on both a large and a small scale.
Students were gathered at Academia Ana
Marie Sandoval, a public bilingual Montessori
school, whose creation had been a battle
every step of the way, said Pam Martinez,
one of the founders of Padres y Jovenes
Unidos, a Denver-based group that works
on improving educational access and quality
for all students.
The school opened in 2001 after her organization
worked on the ousting of a school
board member to pave the way for a school
that would improve the academic performance
of Latino children in the area.
Even the school’s name served as inspira-
tion to students. Its namesake was a vocal
critic of the Denver school board who chastised
the board even as she was dying of
cancer. Ms. Sandoval would come to meetings
lugging an oxygen machine behind
her, Ms. Martinez said. She died before the
school named in her honor was promised.
Posters rested on easels in the school en-
tryway, documenting the steps Denver and
Colorado have taken to change discipline
policies and practices in recent years. The
shifts here are especially significant: The
1999 shootings at Columbine High School
in Jefferson County, Colo., prompted a
surge in police presence in schools, spurred
Photos by Chris Schneider for Education Week
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Education Week - July 10, 2013

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